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Obama is clearly sliding into that "danger zone" out of which incumbent presidents rarely recover. His difficulties arise not one particular problem, but from an overall sense of hopelessness that voters increasingly identify with him. Ironically it was the oil slick, the crisis he did not cause and the one he has the least ability to resolve, that has focused public attention on his failure to lead in other areas. Obama's lateness in weighing in on the crisis in the Gulf followed a pattern he set with his anemic and delayed responses to two fortunately botched terrorist attacks. He and his team appear to regard real and would-be catastrophes as diversions that cause them to take time away from grand "transformational" schemes on which they would rather be working. They have yet to learn that the handful of presidents who did indeed set the nation on a new course succeeded because the public had confidence in both their administrative abilities and had been persuaded that the direction the president outlined was the right one.

For the past eighteen months, when most Americans were feeling the effects of a depressed economy, Obama spent his time on health care. Whatever the merits of his program, most Americans considered this a matter of secondary importance. Most will not see an improvement in the quality of their health care. All, however, will feel the pinch of higher taxes and fees. The story is the same with the stimulus bill. Listening to the administration speak, one would think that all the president had on his mind while assembling it was teacher protection. (Bye bye education reform.)

Meanwhile, that 9.7 percent unemployment rate hangs around the president's neck like an albatross. The president and the ex-Wall Streeters (and tax evaders) he assembled around him (whose social circles include few of the unemployed) give the appearance of having no idea of how perilous a position they are in.

The story is similar in the national security arena. What has the president to show for all the apologies he has made for his country, all the "engagements" he has made toward entities wishing us ill, and all the back-handedness with which he has approached allies of long standing? North Korea sinks a South Korean ship with impunity. Iran forges ahead with its nuclear program. China announces that the U.S. defense secretary is unwelcome in its country. The "special relationship" with the United Kingdom frays. Russia seeks to colonize economically nations it could no longer dominate militarily. (Obama all but admits a Russian "sphere of influence" in eastern Europe, a concession none of his predecessors made.) And the administration shows more sympathy with blockade runners, seeking to provide solace to terrorists, than it does for sister democracy that lifts a page from JFK's astute and restraint handling of the missile crisis. The Obama team even dropped the spread of democracy from its set of national security priorities. That was hardly reassuring to anyone.

Obama's main problem is that, increasingly, the public associates him with bad news. It is that perception, rather than any specific policy decision that can do him in politically.

What should Obama do? The hour may late, but he may yet help himself by taking the following steps:

1) He can start acting (and start appearing to act) as if understands that he is the president of the entire nation, rather than as spokesman for those who elected him.

2) He should stop whining in public about the media and the "talking heads." Self-pity is not a trait people like to see in presidents.

3) He should give serious thought to how perceived weakness on the American produces a less stabile world and diminishes prospects for peace.

4) He should "clean house" before, rather than after the congressional elections.

5) He should change his message as well as his messengers.

Don't count on Obama doing any of this. At the rate he is going, history may well remember him as the latest in a line of presidents who allowed hubris to trump all else, including self-interest.

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